Effects of Corporate Mental Health Initiatives

Companies are investing in, and talking about — mental health more often these days. But employees aren’t reporting a corresponding rise in well-being. Why? Headspace’s 2024 Workplace State of Mind study found that work stress has negatively impacted physical health for 77% of employees and relationships outside of work for 71%. A March 2022 Gallup analysis found that fewer than one in four employees felt their organization cared about their well-being — nearly half the number who said the same at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. So, what happened? Initiatives seem to fall short. Here's why: ◾️ Generic Solutions Don't Cut It: Work demands differ across departments. A one-size-fits-all approach for well-being won't work. ◾️ Leaders Matter: External consultants can't replace internal champions who understand the specific stressors within their teams. ◾️ Inclusion is Key: We need to address mental health across generations and genders, fostering open dialogue. Building a Mentally Healthy Workplace: A Path Forward ◾️ Tailored Strategies: Consider different work styles and stressors across departments. ◾️ Empowerment Through Leaders: Engage managers and leaders as champions for well-being initiatives. ◾️ Open Communication & Shared Experiences: Normalize mental health conversations and acknowledge diverse perspectives. ◾️ Invest in the Long Game: Mental health is a journey, not a destination. Patience and continuous improvement are key. The constant connectivity and hyper-responsiveness fueled by technology worsen work anxiety. We need strategies that address this reality. Let's Shift the Focus: 👉 Focus on People: Organizations need to be a source of connection and support. People are messy and complex, and our well-being thrives within healthy relationships. 👉 Invest in Human Sustainability: Support frameworks like the Surgeon General's Workplace Mental Health and Wellbeing model offer promising solutions. It's Time to Walk the Talk: Leaders: Prioritize your own mental well-being and share your efforts to inspire others. Employees: Advocate for change, share resources, and hold your company accountable. Together, we can create workplaces that prioritize mental health and empower employees to thrive. #mentalhealth #workplacewellness #wellbeing #leadership #communication #humanresources #burnout #prevention

On World Mental Health Day, I'd like to talk about something I call 'mental-health-washing.' When I was in college, I took a class on greenwashing — where companies spend more money marketing themselves as environmentally-friendly than they do on actually protecting the environment. Unfortunately, the exact same thing is happening with mental health. There are so many companies out there spending a huge amount of money and energy to market themselves as mental health-supportive — yet who consistently fail to make the systemic changes that would actually meaningfully support employee well-being. Here are some common examples of mental-health-washing: — Putting executives on stage at fancy summits to talk about how much they care about well-being, while failing to establish a culture where employees can actually take care of their well-being (unfortunately, more often than not, they're creating a culture that actively harms it) — Weaponizing mental health topics like resilience, optimism, the growth mindset as a way to shut down honest conversations and employee boundaries — Hiding behind a mission of 'doing good in the world' while over-working and under-supporting the employees who are actually doing that work — Permitting toxic leaders to stay in their roles because they're high performers, even though their behavior has a deleterious effect on their team members and the organization's culture — Offering webinars about how to take care of your well-being, but never providing the time, space, or support to actually implement those strategies and/or discriminating against those who do — Publicly talking about how much they respect and support their employees, but never addressing ongoing, preventable sources of employee stress and suffering — Celebrating those who 'work the longest' or 'push the hardest' or 'sacrifice the most,' a practice that clearly tells your employees what is valued and rewarded — Promoting your culture of belonging, equity, and inclusion, while also permitting discrimination and inequitable behavior towards employees with different identities, needs and backgrounds — Running employee surveys and making a big deal about how important their feedback is, but never making meaningful changes that address employee concerns — CEOs conducting layoffs, saying "I have made huge mistakes, this is on me," while never once considering cutting their own compensation or removing themselves from the organization to actually protect their employees — Maintaining absurd executive-employee pay ratios that leave many of their employees struggling to survive and to meet their basic needs Companies: you can do better. There are many meaningful ways that you can start actually create a workplace that supports mental health. Just like with greenwashing, I think that it's time that we hold you accountable for aligning what you say with what you do.

Some #solutions are worse than the #problem they claim to solve! The #idea looks neat on paper, and trailing them in real-life sounds like the right thing to do. But when you bring them out in the real-world, they seem to crumble and fall apart. However, the unluckiest of them all are the ones that produce no desired effect, and yet - precisely because they sound like the right thing to do - we continue to administer the medicine! Take the case of #wellness apps. While the problems of #burnouts, #employee #disengagement, #turnover, employee #mentalhealth and #worklifebalance are all real, sadly, the solution hasn't quite helped alleviate the problems at large. Sample this from the article: "...Wellbeing is a nebulous term, but that’s not surprising: it reflects the fact that most organisations have a confused and disjointed approach to supporting employees’ mental and physical health. (Yoga! Wellness apps! Dog petting 🐕🦺!)...Cumulatively, all these measures add up to a corporate spend of $18.4bn — in the US alone — on employee wellbeing. Unsurprisingly, 96 per cent of chief executives think they are “doing enough” for their employees’ mental health. They are certainly spending enough to signal that they care about their staff. It’s just not doing much good: one study in 2019 found that 78 out of 80 wellbeing measures in a big US company had no impact at all 0️⃣." And the solution...something you and I know very well! Here it is from the article: "...The main recommendation? To be effective, managers need to work out what each individual needs — and keep all interventions work-focused." So, for someone who is an overloaded "fragile thriver", asking them to meditate or sleep well might not work as much as giving them a bit more time or resources! Well, it only serves to remind yet again that if basics are not paid heed to, the #newage #technology can only offer faster, more glorious, and clearly much more costlier ways to fail :(.

Well, research is finally proving what behavioral scientists have guessed for forever: mental health apps alone don’t make a dent in employee well-being.  (Check out the recent paper by William Fleming and the recent write up in Harvard Business Review by Jazz Croft  & others- link in comments!) It turns out that without changes in the workplace itself, burnout and stress will keep climbing no matter how many apps you offer. It’s just like how even after we’ve spent decades putting money towards the obesity epidemic, it’s still an epidemic. Because technology availability alone isn’t enough to create real behavior change that leads to addressing these issues. For years, I taught Worksite Wellness where I would assign 2-3 students to real-world workplaces to run behavior change programs involving physical activity or nutrition. We’d talk about how to engage the organization to make its own changes while trying to engage employees. And year after year, it was the worksites that actually got involved and made organizational-level changes that saw the best results. Nothing’s changed between then and now. Companies want to purchase or invent a magic cure-all app (and I’d love that, too!) but it doesn’t exist. Like most things in life, the apps work when you work them. Companies building the apps should be building a team to help with implementation, engagement, and behavioral change on a business level, too. (And maybe future research should check if combining individual-level interventions and workplace change works best… or, you know, just improving working conditions.) #science #fractionalCSO #wellnessapps

"The study surveyed more than 45,000 employees to assess the impact of wellness programs and interventions and found that almost none of the offerings — apps, coaching, relaxation classes, courses in time management or financial health — had any positive effect on employee wellness. A single notable exception on the surveyed wellness offerings: Workers who were given the opportunity to do charity or volunteer work did seem to have improved well-being." "The author of the study, Dr. William Fleming, said, 'If employees want access to mindfulness apps, sleep programs, and well-being apps, there is nothing wrong with that. But if you’re seriously trying to drive employees well-being, then it has to be about working practices.'" https://lnkd.in/gpw28S22 #employeebenefits #mentalhealthatwork #wellness